Share Your Thoughts: Future of the Community Summit at DrupalCons

If you are interested in Drupal community and you are coming to Drupalcon, we are looking for your opinions!

Take the Community Content at DrupalCon Survey.

For a very long time, community conversations at DrupalCon took place at sessions in the community track, which ran alongside all the other content at DrupalCons. The community track allowed for presentations on topics related to our community. While it was good to be able to raise the topics, there were real concerns that the session format meant that nothing productive came from the conversation. Further, the community track was just much less attended than other sessions, with 25 or so folks in a room that holds 200.

At DrupalCon Prague in 2013, we launched the first Community Summit. Held on the Monday of DrupalCon week, it is a day-long event designed in an un-conference style to bring community members together to tackle the issues that help our community achieve more together. Morten DK, Addison Berry, and others (bless you all - you have been great collaborators) ran the program and led a number of very useful conversations.

For the last few DrupalCons we have run these community summits, and have heard a whole new round of feedback, including:

  • Work at the Summit does not tend to continue after the Summit, so we lose momentum.
  • We don’t always have the right people in the room to really solve some of these problems.

We also did some surveying of our community leaders at the beginning of last year and heard that they are very hungry for skills training that can help them take their camps, meetups, trainings, etc. to the next level. They want to learn about how to manage the finances of a camp, how to recruit sponsors, and how to be better public speakers. The current community summit format does not really allow for this kind of skills training either.

So - we are looking for your feedback about how we might restructure the community content at DrupalCons.

Take the Community Content at DrupalCon Survey.

Just so you know, I hit the woods with my family and no internet and no phones for one week a year, and that week is next week. I won’t be able to respond to comments or the survey while I’m gone, but I will do so when I return. If you have feelings, ideas, or feelings about ideas - stick them in the survey! I’ll share the results back out. If you have book recommendations for my trip, hit me up on Twitter.

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Holly Ross
Executive Director
Drupal Association